Your Privacy Score Is Probably an F

Open any major news site right now. Before you read a single headline, somewhere between 30 and 80 trackers will load in the background, including ad networks, analytics scripts, fingerprinting tools, and session recorders. All of them run silently while you scroll.

That cookie banner you clicked “Accept” on authorized dozens of third parties to follow you across the web. The ones you didn’t click “Accept” on often track you anyway.

What we found

We scored popular websites across news, shopping, social media, and entertainment using Shield’s grading system. The results are grim.

News sites are the worst offenders. Major outlets routinely load 60 to 80 tracking scripts per page. That is not the site’s own analytics. It is third-party ad exchanges, data brokers, and session replay tools that the site sold access to. The site gets a fraction of a cent per pageview, and you get surveilled.

Shopping sites average 40 to 50 trackers. They want to know everything about your browsing session so they can retarget you later. Even sites that claim to care about privacy typically run 15 to 25 trackers.

Social media platforms are harder to score because the entire product is the tracking. The trackers are not third-party. They are the platform itself, collecting everything you do to sell advertising against it.

Most sites we tested scored D or F, and that’s not an exaggeration. The modern web was built on an advertising model that treats your data as the product.

How Shield scores sites

Every site gets a grade from S (perfect) to F based on four factors.

Tracker count and type. More trackers means a worse score. Fingerprinting scripts weigh heavier than basic analytics because they’re harder to defend against and persist across sessions.

Cookie behavior. Does the site respect your rejection? Does it set tracking cookies before you consent? Does it use cookie syncing to merge profiles across trackers?

Data sharing. How many third parties receive your data when you visit?

Encryption and security. Basic hygiene like HTTPS, secure headers, and content security policies.

An S means a perfect score: zero trackers, no fingerprinting, clean cookies, HTTPS. An A means the site respects your privacy with minimal tracking and clean behavior. Both are rare. An F means the site is a surveillance machine with dozens of trackers, fingerprinting, pre-consent cookies, and data flowing to companies you’ve never heard of.

What you can do

Start with your browser. Firefox with strict tracking protection and Brave both block a lot by default, while Chrome blocks very little out of the box.

Install Shield. It scores every site you visit in real time, blocks trackers, auto-rejects cookie consent banners, and flags fingerprinting attempts. The free tier covers the basics, and Premium adds deeper fingerprint detection and cross-session tracking analysis.

Audit your most-visited sites. Check the privacy score on the 10 sites you use most. That recipe blog you love is probably an F, and your bank is hopefully better, but not always.

Stop clicking “Accept All.” Look for the reject option, or better yet, use a tool that handles it automatically.

The web doesn’t have to work this way, but it won’t change until people can see what’s actually happening behind their screens.